Squab Pie
After the squabs are picked and drawn as a large fowl is for roasting, wash them and put them in a saucepan with a close cover. They should be covered with boiling water and boiled slowly till tender, when a little salt and an onion clove should be added. Then take them out, drain and dry, and put in each squab a teaspoonful of butter, a little pepper, salt, minced parsley and thyme. Then put into the cavity of each squab, a hard boiled egg. Lay them in a large, round, earthen baking dish, three or four inches deep. Strain over them the liquor in which they were simmered. Add a tablespoonful of butter and a teacup of milk or cream Sift in two tablespoonfuls of cracker crumbs not browned a tablespoonful of minced parsley and thyme, and a little salt. Put in a few slips of pastry. Cover with a rich crust and bake. The same recipe will answer for robins, except that the eggs must be chopped, instead of being placed whole in the cavity of the bird.--Mrs. S.T.
A two-stage pie: the birds are poached until tender, stuffed, then baked under a crust in their own broth. Nothing here is difficult, but the original gives no oven temperature, no timings for the baking, and no yield.
- Squab, and what to buySquab is a young domestic pigeon, slaughtered before it flies, usually 12-16 oz dressed. Order from a game butcher or online supplier; they come cleaned. Cornish game hens are the usual stand-in, though they are larger and blander.
- Do not use robinsThe closing line offering robins as a substitute is now unlawful in the United States and Canada. American robins are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, and killing or possessing them carries federal penalties. Treat that sentence as a historical note only.
- The poaching is the hingeSquab is dark, lean and toughens fast. Simmer barely at a tremble, never at a boil, and check at 25-30 minutes: the leg should give when twisted. Overcooked squab in a pie cannot be rescued by the crust.
- "An onion clove"Almost certainly an onion stuck with a whole clove, a standard aromatic of the period, rather than a clove of garlic. Add it with the salt after the birds have begun to soften, as directed, so the flavour stays light.
- MeasuresA teacup in receipts of this period is usually reckoned at roughly 3/4 cup, so read the milk or cream that way. The butter quantities are generous by modern habit but not out of range: about 1 teaspoon inside each bird plus 1 tablespoon in the dish.
- "A few slips of pastry"Most likely strips of raw pastry laid in the liquid before the top crust goes on; such strips were often said to swell and help body the gravy. Two or three strips the width of a finger is enough.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake at 400F until the crust is set and coloured, about 30-35 minutes; the filling is already cooked, so you are only baking pastry and reducing the gravy. Cut a vent in the lid or the milk will boil up under it.
- The whole eggsA hard-boiled egg inside each bird looks handsome but makes carving awkward at table. Serve one squab per person, lifted out whole with a large spoon, and let each diner deal with the egg.
- Cracker crumbs"Not browned" means plain, untoasted cracker crumbs, which thicken without adding colour. Unseasoned saltine crumbs are the closest current equivalent; skip seasoned dry breadcrumbs, which will muddy the sauce.
Squab pie in Virginia is a pigeon pie, but the name carried another sense entirely: in Devon and Cornwall a squab pie has long meant mutton baked with apples. Domestic pigeons were kept in dovecotes on Virginia plantations as a reliable supply of tender meat, and a squab was among the cheapest luxuries a household could produce, ready at about four weeks without ever having been fed at pasture. The instruction that the same method "will answer for robins" is a plain reminder of how comprehensively small songbirds were eaten in the nineteenth-century South, a practice curtailed after market hunting and falling bird populations prompted protective legislation. Like most entries in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), this one is signed with initials: Marion Cabell Tyree assembled the book from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, and their recipes read as notes between cooks who already knew what a moderate oven felt like.